Ray Hwang

"... an insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion.."

—Nathaniel Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook

(This quote crossed my path twice - as an epigraph to Fred Moten's In the Break, and in the beginning of an essay by Hoa Nguyen titled "Tatters & the Selvage Edge: A Palimpsestic Consideration of H.D.'s Poetics")

"Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater."

—Walter Benjamin

The recent palimpsestic paintings by Ray Hwang strike me at first as sanguine sun and coast, palm trees, shimmering sea, recalling happy beach days. Upon returning to view them again I feel the thick sfumato choking heaven in smog. We are living on the edge of cataclysmic change, in post-apocalyptic worlds where displacement and destruction loom and press a pattern of disarray upon a layered scrim of memory. What kind of a place is haunted by ghosts? What happened there? Who is haunted? Who are the ghosts?

Ray Hwang (b. 1992, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist from LA, living and working out of Ridgewood, NY. His work consists primarily of acrylic painting and drawing, in which he abstracts and layers imagery from his personal history to explore themes of family, home and inter-cultural contradiction. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2016 and has since exhibited throughout New York City and internationally. He has been featured in Art Maze Magazine, Vast Magazine, and has been a recipient of the Keyholder Residency at the Lower East Side Printshop (New York, NY), the Plum Lime Residency (Brooklyn, NY), and the Moosey Residency (Norwich, UK). He has shown with Tube Culture Hall (Milan, Italy), LaiSun Keane Gallery (Boston, MA), 81 Leonard Gallery (New York, NY), and at Spring/Break Art Show (New York, NY). He opened his first solo exhibition in New York with Latitude Gallery in 2023, and is currently a member of the gallery and curatorial collective Below Grand on the Lower East Side in NY.